The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and CriticismEliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns)
General
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns)
Criticism; Literature
In the work of Maeterlinck and Claudel on the one hand, and those of M.
Bergson on the other, we have the mixture of the genres in which our age
delights. Every work of imagination must have a philosophy; and every
philosophy must be a work of art—how often have we heard that M. Bergson
is an artist! It is a boast of his disciples. It is what the word “art”
means to them that is the disputable point. Certain works of philosophy
can be called works of art: much of Aristotle and Plato, Spinoza, parts
of Hume, Mr. Bradley’s _Principles of Logic_, Mr. Russell’s essay on
“Denoting”: clear and beautifully formed thought. But this is not what
the admirers of Bergson, Claudel, or Maeterlinck (the philosophy of the
latter is a little out of date) mean. They mean precisely what is not
clear, but what is an emotional stimulus. And as a mixture of thought
and of vision provides more stimulus, by suggesting both, both clear
thinking and clear statement of particular objects must disappear.
The undigested “idea” or philosophy, the idea-emotion, is to be found
also in poetic dramas which are conscientious attempts to adapt a true
structure, Athenian or Elizabethan, to contemporary feeling. It appears
sometimes as the attempt to supply the defect of structure by an
internal structure. “But most important of all is the structure of the
incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and
of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action,
not a quality.”[6]
Footnote 6:
_Poetics_, vi. 9. Butcher’s translation.
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